Mir 1.1

I’ve spent most of this week at a “Snapcraft Summit”, which means I didn’t do much coding on Mir itself. Similarly @wmww has been busy again porting the MATE panel to Wayland and some associated work to facilitate debugging Wayland interactions. And @raof has been busy making sure that our changes to support Nvidia drivers won’t break Unity8 or the Ubuntu Touch project that uses it.

The result of this is we’re still not ready to release Mir 1.1 with Nvidia support. Most of the code we need is up for review but there are a few edges need polishing.

Mir snaps

A new, confined, desktop snap

This demonstrates that a more capable graphical environment than mir-kiosk can be deployed using snaps to a range of devices from IoT to desktop.

Having a more realistic “desktop” available as a strictly confined snap also proves that we can deliver a useful experience without bypassing the security constraints that are a feature of Ubuntu Core.

The egmde desktop snap

Since I created this it has only ran successfully on Unity 18.04. But with my new knowledge of Snaps and Snapcraft it became clear to me that it should work on other Ubuntu series (and, possibly, other distributions). Having tracked down the bug that was stopping it working I have an improved version that works well on 18.10 and runs on 16.04 (but on 16.04 we lack support for obsolete Wayland extensions the toolkits try to use there).